Dr. Natalie Person is a Professor of Psychology and currently serves as the Dean for Community Engagement at Rhodes College. In this role, she also serves as the Executive Director of the Lynne and Henry Turley Memphis Center for Community Engagement, which supports community engaged education, research, and action across the College. She supervises three fulltime staff and eight faculty directors of high-impact community engaged programs. Dr. Person spearheaded efforts to secure a grant from the Mellon Foundation to create the Institute for Race and Social Transformation at Rhodes. From 2019-2024, she served as Dean for Curricular Development where she oversaw undergraduate research and fellowships, First-Year Seminar and other curricular initiatives, the Workday Student academic implementation, and several interdisciplinary centers and institutes, including the Buckman Center for Global Engagement, the Curb Institute for Music, and the Meeman Center for Lifelong Learning. Dr. Person has led the efforts to develop an Educational Studies major with licensure, a Master of Arts in Urban Education, and a Summer Scholars program for high school students. She has also developed study abroad and away programs in Africa, South America, and the U.S. and has led other curricular reform initiatives. She has distinguished herself as a faculty leader serving as Chair of Psychology for nine years, as well as leading campus-wide task forces for Distance Learning and for Community Engagement. She is a strong advocate for shared governance and has chaired numerous faculty committees, including the Faculty Governance Committee and has represented the faculty on the Board of Trustees. Dr. Person is an accomplished, internationally recognized interdisciplinary scholar whose research bridges psychology, education, and artificial intelligence. She has received grant awards from the National Science Foundation, The Institute for Defense Analyses, Institute for Education Sciences, the Office of Naval Research, and the U.S. Congress. She has published over 100 papers in peer-reviewed psychology, education, computer science, and learning sciences journals and conference proceedings and has presented numerous papers at national and international conferences. She has received the Clarence Day Award for Outstanding Research and the Jameson M. Jones Award for Outstanding Faculty Service, the highest Rhodes College honors bestowed on faculty for research and service, respectively. In Memphis, Dr. Person is active in a number of community and civic organizations and is an enthusiastic patron and supporter of the performing and visual arts.
Learn more about Dr. Person's research here.
Selected Publications
Person, N. K., D鈥橫ello, S., & Olney, A. (in press). Toward socially intelligent interviewing systems. In F. G. Conrad & M. F. Schober (eds.), Envisioning the survey interview of the future. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Graesser, A.C., Person, N., Lu, Z., Jeon, M.G., & McDaniel, B. (2005). Learning while holding a conversation with a computer. In L. PytlikZillig, M. Bodvarsson, & R. Bruning (Eds.), Technology-based education: Bringing researchers and practitioners together (pp. 143-167). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.
Person, N. K., Hancock, J. T., Burke, D. R., & Graesser, A. C. (2004). A linguistic model that infers user states and traits. In ITS 2004 Workshop Proceedings on Social and Emotional Intelligence in Learning Environments. Maceio, Brazil Springer-Verlag.
Person, N. K., & Graesser, A. C., & The Tutoring Research Group (2003). Fourteen facts about human tutoring: Food for thought for ITS developers. AI-ED 2003 Workshop Proceedings on Tutorial Dialogue Systems: With a View Toward the Classroom (pp. 335-344). Sydney, Australia.
Person, N. K., & Graesser, A. C. (2003). Pedagogical Agents and Tutors. In J. W. Guthrie (Ed.),Encyclopedia of education (2nd ed. Vol. 2 586-589). New York: Macmillan.
Moreno, K. N., Person, N. K., Adcock, A. B., Van Eck, R. N., Jackson, G. T., & Marineau, J. C. (2002). Etiquette and efficacy in animated pedagogical agents: The role of stereotypes. Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium: Etiquette for Human Computer Work (pp.77-80). Falmouth, MA: AAAI Press.
Person, N. K., Graesser, A. C., & The Tutoring Research Group (2002). Human or computer: AutoTutor in a bystander Turing test. In S. A. Cerri, G. Gouarderes, & F. Paraguacu (Eds.) Intelligent Tutoring Systems 2002 Proceedings (pp. 821-830). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Graesser, A. C., Person, N. K., & Hu, X. (2002). Improving comprehension through discourse processing. New Directions in Teaching and Learning, 89, 33-44.
Graesser, A.C., Person, N., Harter, D., & TRG (2001). Teaching tactics and dialog in AutoTutor.International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 12, 257-279.
Person, N. K., Graesser, A. C., Bautista, L., Mathews, E. C., & The Tutoring Research Group (2001). Evaluating student learning gains in two versions of AutoTutor. In J. D. Moore, C. L. Redfield, & W. L. Johnson (Eds.) Artificial intelligence in education: AI-ED in the wired and wireless future (pp. 286-293). Amsterdam, IOS Press.
Person, N. K., Gholson, B., Craig, S. D., Hu, X., Stewart, C. O., & Graesser, A. C. (2001). HURAA: An interactive web-based agent that optimizes information retrieval in a multi-media environment. In C. Montgomerie & J. Viteli (Eds.) Proceedings for ED-MEDIA 2001: World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications. (pp. 1476-1481). Norfolk, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education.
Person, N. K., Graesser, A. C., Kreuz, R. J., Pomeroy, V., & The Tutoring Research Group (2001). Simulating human tutor dialog moves in AutoTutor. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 12, 23-39.
Person, N. K., Graesser, A. C., Harter, D., Mathews, E. C., & The Tutoring Research Group. (2000). Dialog move generation and conversation management in AutoTutor. Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium: Building Dialogue Systems for Tutorial Applications (pp. 45-51). Falmouth, MA: AAAI Press.
Person, N. K., & Graesser, A. C. (1999). Evolution of discourse in cross-age tutoring. In A. M.O鈥橠onnell and A. King (Eds.), Cognitive perspectives on peer learning (pp. 69-86). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Person, N. K., Kreuz, R. J., Zwaan, R., & Graesser, A. C. (1995). Pragmatics and pedagogy: Conversational rules and politeness strategies may inhibit effective tutoring. Cognition and Instruction, 13, 161-188.
Person, N. K., Graesser, A. C., Magliano, J. P., & Kreuz, R. J. (1994). Inferring what the student knows in one-to-one tutoring: The role of student questions and answers. Learning and Individual Differences, 6, 205-229.
Graesser, A. C., & Person, N. K. (1994). Question asking during tutoring. American Educational Research Journal, 31, 104-137.
